A Separate Peace

John Knowles

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Chapter 1, page 2

page 1 of 2

Summary

Gene Forrester, the narrator of the story, returns to
the Devon School in New Hampshire, fifteen years after being a student
there. He walks around the campus and notices that everything seems
well preserved, as if a coat of varnish had been applied to the
buildings, keeping them just as they were during his time there.
He reflects on how fearful he was in those days—the early 1940s,
while World War II raged in Europe—and decides to visit the two
places that he most closely associates with that fear. The first
is a marble staircase in one of the academic buildings, which Gene
decides must be made of incredibly hard stone, since the depressions
created by students’ feet over the years are still shallow. After
staring at these steps for a time, he goes back outside, passing
the dormitories and the gymnasium, ruining his shoes as he trudges
across the soggy playing fields in the rain. He eventually reaches
the river and searches for a specific tree on its banks, which he
locates with some difficulty in a grove of trees similar to each
other. He identifies his tree by a number of scars on its trunk
and by the way that one of its branches sticks out over the river.
He reflects that this tree now seems so much smaller than it did during
his youth, and a French proverb comes to his mind: plus c’est la
même chose, plus ça change, meaning “the more things remain the
same, the more they change.” He turns to go inside out of the rain.

At this point, the narrative flashes back to the summer
of 1942, when Gene is sixteen and standing at the foot of the same
tree, which looms hugely like a “steely black steeple.” Gene is
there with his roommate Phineas, or Finny, and three other boys:
Elwin “Leper” Lepellier, Chet Douglass, and Bobby Zane. Finny tries
to persuade them to jump off a branch of the tree into the river—a
feat that no student of their age has ever tried before. The jump
is done by the older boys in the school as part of their physical
training prior to their graduation and departure for the war.

Finny jumps first to show the others that it is possible,
popping up out of the river to declare how fun the jump is. He then
sends Gene up the tree for his turn. Gene finds himself in a mild
state of shock once he reaches the limb. As he ponders the plunge,
Finny orders him to jump. Gene does so, but the other three boys
refuse. The group heads back to the center of campus, Finny and
Gene walking side by side. Finny tells Gene that he performed admirably once
he had been “shamed” into jumping; outwardly, Gene denies being
shamed into it, though he knows Finny’s claim is true. The school
bell rings, signaling dinner, and Finny trips Gene and wrestles
him to the ground. After they get up, Gene walks faster, and Finny
teases him for wanting to be on time for dinner. Gene tackles him,
and they wrestle each other in the twilight while the others run ahead.
Realizing now that their wrestling has indeed made them quite late
for dinner, Finny and Gene skip the meal and go straight to their
room to do homework.

Analysis

This first chapter establishes the narrator’s position
as an adult looking back on an incident in his adolescence from
a perspective of (theoretically) greater maturity and wisdom. Gene’s
wandering around the Devon campus in the opening scene creates a
mood of dread that infuses the entire novel: the older Gene refuses
to offer us any details of the story to come, but he makes ambiguous
references to “specters” that haunted him as a young man, to “fear’s
echo,” and to a “death by violence.” These hints of darkness are
explicitly linked to two places that the older Gene visits: the
stairs and the tree, thus foreshadowing the revelation of the tragic
events that take place in those two locations.

Although Gene has deliberately returned to Devon, in many ways
his purpose seems to be to prove the impossibility of true return:
he wants things to be different on this visit to his old school; he
wants to have a sense that time has passed—and erased, we assume—the
dark events of his high school years. Thus, he feels disconcerted
at how new and varnished the school looks, as if it had been frozen
in time since the days when he attended. The hardness of the marble
steps he finds equally disquieting, for it makes them look “the
same as ever.” The most threatening aspect of these observations
for Gene is what they imply about himself: that the passage of time
hasn’t changed him either. Indeed, he notes, the only things that
have changed for him in the years since high school are the superficial
matters of “money and success and ‘security.’ ” When Gene discovers,
then, that the tree by the river seems smaller than it did in his
youth, he conveys a profound sense of relief. In citing the French
proverb, however, Gene reverses the order of the clauses, which,
when correctly ordered, translate to “the more things change, the
more they stay the same” as opposed to his version, “the more things
stay the same, the more they change.” His emphasis, whether conscious
or unconscious, on the idea of things staying the same suggests
a fear that he has not changed. As the novel progresses, the reader
gradually comes to realize what it would mean to Gene if he had
not moved beyond the person he was during his high school years.

The flashback that begins midway through this first chapter
and lasts throughout the entire novel creates an odd effect: once
the narrative drops us back into the 1940s, the story seems to be
told from the perspective of the younger Gene; yet the narrator
frequently inserts commentary and philosophical musings that seem
to come from the older Gene. This shifting perspective is part of
a larger complexity in A Separate Peace: namely, the problem of
the unreliable narrator. While we can assume that Gene recounts
external events relatively accurately, he seems less forthcoming
about his own emotions and desires. The reader is forced to read
between the lines in many of the book’s passages, especially those
detailing Gene’s relationship with Finny.